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Archive for 2013

This morning Autodesk announced a pay-as-you-go model for all the company’s desktop software including the latest Design and Creation Suites, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Autodesk Maya LT. A “hangout” was held this morning on Google this morning where Andrew Anagnost, SVP, Industry Strategy & Marketing for Autodesk and other industry specialists, discussed this new offering.

Businesses are increasingly adopting this type of model for consuming services and products as opposed to owning software. Options generally include renting, sharing or purchasing subscriptions such as this “pay-as-you-go” model. This way designers, engineers and architects no longer will have to be concerned about purchasing the next version of the software. New comers will also be able to get up and running on the software with few up-front costs, and get projects started with this software.

With the number of disasters that occur in the world today – both natural and unnatural – children get separated from their families with increasing frequency. Jorge Just, a student in a class called “Design for Unicef,” at New York University’s Tisch School for the Arts, wanted to make a an app for people who were under emotional stress. His idea went beyond the usual app for those with great Wi-Fi connections and cell service available in the inner cities.

Children in third-world countries certainly don’t have these advantages, and what Just found in his five visits to Uganda was that lost children were relegated to old systems where paper-based forms were manually entered into large databases, and the children themselves may not be that distant geographically from their parents.

It looks as though Microsoft Corp. is moving into a paradigm shift with its move toward a $7 billion acquisition from Nokia to thrust it into the mobile market. Nokia will still remain a company after Microsoft buys the company’s handset business. While Microsoft is acquiring what Nokia is best known for, the Finnish company is holding on to two if its major businesses: networking and mapping. Microsoft has been hoping to take a slice of the mobile market from smartphone moguls Apple and Google, and meanwhile has been partnering with Nokia for three years.

Esri’s Rim Fire Perspectives Map is available for ongoing wildfire coverage. This story map contains three different views of the fire and shows which areas and infrastructure are threatened by the fire, how the fire has grown, and where fires have burned near Yosemite in the past.

Readers may remember “Herbie” the runaway “autonomous” car in the Fred MacMurray movie of many years ago that created entertaining havoc. According to ABI Research, in North America, the first driverless vehicles will appear in the beginning of the next decade, evolving to more than 10 million robotic vehicles shipping in 2032.

ZEB1, a truly mobile handheld rapid laser mapping system from 3D Laser Mapping, has been used to explore Aboriginal cave markings in South Australia. The strange markings, called finger flutings, were thought to have been left in the Koonalda Cave between about 30,000 and 10,000 years ago.

These finger flutings are the creation of hands dragged along existing grooves in soft limestone cave walls. It’s amazing they have lasted this long as the limestone is very fragile and crumbles easily at a mere touch. With the help of the ZEB1 handheld mobile mapping system, researchers have been able to create a detailed 3D Survey of the cave system. Combining this 3D survey data with high resolution photographs and analysis of the flutings, archaeologists from the SA Museum can analyze them.

In July, Esri and MapmyIndia announced a Strategic Business Alliance that is designed to expand the use of geospatial technology in India. MapmyIndia has extensive data covering all of India’s 600,000 towns and villages, approximately 10 million points of interest and 1.9 million kilometers of highway and street network. The company plans to migrate its entire data production environment to the ArcGIS platform, so that it can take advantage of Esri’s cartographic tools and workflows. Over 80 percent of all automotive navigation systems installed in India use MapmyIndia data and the company sends out data updates every four to six months.

Ben Somerville, Spatial Systems Manager for Thiess, Pty, Ltd. In Queensland, Australia, talked about the work they are doing with the Australian Telecom at the Esri UC 2013 Survey Summit. He began by saying that Australia is 70% the size of the U.S. and has a population of 23 million. Less than 1 % of the population is connected by cable. They have over 45 million yards of cable designed with a project estimated cost of $40 billion which “may be different in reality.”